TGIF Feature: SF film festival honors director Wayne Wang

WAYNE WANG

FILMMAKER Wayne Wang will be honored during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival with a special tribute, followed by a screening of his 1995 film Smoke, newly remastered and recolored.

"Wayne Wang has consistently been among the most interesting and engaging filmmakers at work in the American independent and Hollywood scenes," said SFFILM Executive Director Noah Cowan. 

"A pioneer and giant in telling Asian/American stories but with a career that sprawls from Hong Kong to Florida and back again, he continues to inspire us as he rethinks and reinterprets his work for the digital age. We are delighted that he has held back the new version of his masterpiece Smoke for our Festival."  

After the tribute there will be ascreening of Wang's 1995 film Smoke, newly remastered and recolored.  

Wayne Wang has always followed his own path in a career that's jumped between genres and countries, working at both independent-budget and Hollywood scale. 

One of the most important Asian/American directors living today, Wang was born in Hong Kong and named after his father's favorite movie star, John Wayne. He moved to California in the late '60s and studied film and television at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. 

Wang's first feature film, Chan Is Missing (1982) was financed through grants and set in San Francisco's Chinatown. 

Wang is often identified with films about the Chinese diaspora including, Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), and The Joy Luck Club (1993) but has also made such studio features as Maid in Manhattan (2002) with Jennifer Lopez and Last Holiday (2006) with Queen Latifah, and independent features such as Blue in the Face (Festival 1994) and Center of the World (Festival 2001). 

His most recent feature, While the Women Are Sleeping, was loosely based on Javier Marias's short story and shot in Japan. 

If you're going: Tickets to "A Tribute to Wayne Wang: Smoke" are $13 for SFFILM members, $16 for the general public. Box office is open to SFFILM members now online at sffilm.org and opens for the general public.

True to its name, the festival will show 183 films. Among the 45 countries represented, motion pictures or documentaries from Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Korea, Hongkong, Malaysia and China will be featured during the two-week festival starting April 4 and concluding April 17.

A documentary about the ascendence of Filipino cuisine in the United States, Ulam: Main Dish, will be presented April 7. Directed by Filipino/American Alexandra Cuerda, the film interviews several Filipino American chefs. "Through pioneering Filipino-American chefs and restaurateurs, we discuss the issues inherent in the Fil-Am crossover; also, we celebrate the newfound success of the thriving culinary community that is the Filipino food movement," says Cuerda.  

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HBO announces finalists of APA Visionaries short film competition

THE THREE FINALISTS of HBO Asian Pacific American Visionaries, a short film competition that provides emerging directors of Asian and/or Pacific Islander descent the opportunity to showcase their work last Feb. 22 in New York City.

Filmmakers Maritte Go (“Remittance”), Huay-Bing Law (“June”), and Feng-I Fiona Roan (“Jiejie”) will have their shorts premiere at the 2018 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival in May; where the first, second and third place winners will be announced.

HBO will debut the trio of films during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May on its on-demand and digital platforms (including HBO NOW®, HBO GO®, HBO On Demand® and affiliate portals).

For this year’s competition, directors were asked to explore the concept of “home” in creative and innovative ways.

As a result, the trio of films addresses a range of historic – and timely – issues of immigration, racism and assimilation.

About the finalists

• Maritte Go (“Remittance”) 

She is a Filipino/American filmmaker who attended USC as a graduate student with a Masters in Film and TV Production.

She is currently in pre-production to direct and write a horror anthology produced by Radio Silence.

Inspired by her immigrant family’s experiences, “Remittance” tells the story of a Filipino cruise worker who receives a call informing her that her son is in the hospital.

• Huay-Bing Law (“June”) 

Heis a native Texan whose narrative and documentary shorts have earned a Student Academy Award nomination and other notable honors.

He is currently pursuing his MFA in Film Production from the University of Texas at Austin.

Set on an American college campus during the 1960s, “June” chronicles the experience of a young Chinese woman as she attends her husband’s graduation.

• Feng-I Fiona Roan (“Jiejie”) 

She is a writer/director born in Taipei, raised in Oregon and now living in Los Angeles, where she earned her directing MFA from the American Film Institute.

Prior to filmmaking, Feng-I was trained in classical Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University.

“Jiejie” is a portrait of two young sisters being raised by a single immigrant mother in Los Angeles in 1997.

Judged by a panel of HBO executives, industry leaders, and fellow APA filmmakers, the jury also included representatives from the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE).

Launched in 2016, APA Visionaries was created to help further the dialogue about race, diversity and representation in Hollywood while also identifying new cinematic storytellers who offer unique perspectives of the Asian Pacific American experience.

“HBO is proud to not only be part of the dialogue about media diversity but also leading new conversations around it,” stated Jackie Gagne, VP Multicultural Marketing at HBO.

“With Asian Pacific American Visionaries, we are empowering communities through representation while celebrating great artistic talent.”

“In order for progress and change to be possible for Asian Americans in Hollywood, the major studios and networks must find ways to work together with our community,” said Francis Cullado, Executive Director of Visual Communications, the organization that produces the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival,"  said Michelle K. Sugihara, Executive Director of CAPE.

“Asian Pacific American Visionaries perfectly aligns with our organization’s core principles of creating new opportunities for APA artists and advancing culture through entertainment.”
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Sundance film festival spotlights Asian & Asian/American filmmakers

John Cho in the feature film 'Search'

YOU WON'T FIND blockbusters with superheroes and tons of special effects at the Sundance Film Festival. Events like Sundance give independent filmmakers a chance to expose their movies to potential distributors.

Artistically, Asian and Asian/American movie makers did pretty well but whether that will translate into a distribution deal, only time will tell.

One of the movies picked up by a distributor is Search, starring John Cho and Debra Messing. Search, a taut thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty, won the Audience Award. Sony reportedly paid $5-million for distribution rights, according to Variety.

Cho said it was “exciting” to play a member of an all Asian-American family in the movie. “I’m usually paired with someone who is not Asian, which is progressive in its own sense,” he said. 

 "I wanted to put this family on screen. I wanted to see a loving family, a family that wasn't dysfunctional,"

“But I thought to have a complete family that was all Asian-American was an interesting thing. It wasn’t what it was about, but it was a part of it, and I like that.”

Sundance has been kind to Cho. His last movie, the indie film Columbus, also debuted at the Utah venue featuring a 3-dimensional, subdued but perfect performance by the actor. The movie directed by Kogonada has been well received by critics and one of the few films with an Asian/American lead who wasn't a martial artist or a computer geek.

Computers and the Internet is central to Search, as Cho plays David, a father searching for his daughter by going through her social media accounts trying to find out what happened to her. While a helpful detective searches for Margot out in the real world, David grasps at rediscovering his daughter in an unfamiliar online landscape as he searches through the traces she left behind on her laptop.

Besides Search other documentaries and features by Asian and Asian/American filmmakers received notice at the festival's awards ceremony.

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award:

Christina Choe for Nancy, which she also directed. An aspiring writer confuses fact and fiction when she finds a couple she believes are her real parents.

Special Jury Award – Social Impact Filmmaking:

Stephen Maing for directing Crime + Punishment.  A group of minority whistleblower officers who risk everything to expose racially discriminatory policing practices and smash the blue wall of silence. 

Special Jury Award – Breakthrough Filmmaking:

Bing Liu for directing Minding the Gap (Diane Quon producing), A documentary follows Bing, who at age 24, returns home and reconnects with his friends Zack and Keire, whom he’s been skateboarding with since childhood.

Special Jury Award – Cinematography:

Genesis 2.0 to Das Peter Indergand and Maxim Arbugaev (also director). A documentary on two competing groups who hunt for mammoth tusks for entirely different reasons.

Dead Pigs

Special Jury Prize – Ensemble Acting:

Dead Pigs directed by Cathy Yan. A feature giving a glimpse of modern China through the intersection of a seemingly unconnected group of diverse people.

Best Directing for a Documentary:

Sandi Tan for Shirkers. A Chinese novelist searches for the man who stole the raw footage of her first attempt to make a movie.

Not all of these features and documentaries found a distributor. The ones that did find a distributor, such as Search, will probably get shown in local art houses or regional film festivals. Also, check the listings of your PBS station who might show them this May during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
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